Executive Inspector General

This is The Players, your update on who's who in Illinois politics and what they're up to.

This week you'll hear Amanda Vinicky's conversation with the man who has power - as in, subpoena power - to really discover what Illinois' political players are doing: Executive Inspector General Ricardo Meza.

The state official who led an investigation into political hiring under former Governor Pat Quinn's administration is resigning.

Executive Inspector General Ricardo Meza is stepping down this month, after more than four-and-a-half years investigating allegations of misconduct in the governor's office, 40 state agencies and public universities.

Much of what Meza's office does is kept secret, like investigations that don't produce findings of wrongdoing. Even some of those that do can be kept confidential.

An investigation found that four Illinois Department of Human Rights employees supposedly examining discrimination complaints forged signatures and falsified documents to cover for work they didn't do.

The report Monday by the Office of the Executive Inspector General also found supervisors failed to monitor the four investigators, who resigned in 2011 and 2012.

Officials at Chicago area rail transit agency Metra are being reprimanded for allowing workers to switch shifts without properly filling out paperwork. Illinois' inspector general says this practice could have led to fatigued conductors operating trains.

The so-called shift "swapping" created confusion at Metra, according to the office of the executive inspector general. In its three-year investigation, it concluded employees who were swapping shifts — usually to allow some to get a Saturday off — wouldn't fill out paperwork indicating they weren't working.

A former state official has agreed to pay a record $100,000 fine to settle charges he violated a state ethics law. Barry Maram is accused of going to work for a state contractor a week after he left his job as director of Healthcare and Family Services.

Maram was HFS director from the earliest days of the Blagojevich administration through April 2010.

Maram went on to take a job with the Chicago law firm Shefsky & Forelich (now part of Taft)